This Is How I Save My Life

I WAS 28 YEARS OLD WHEN I FOUND MYSELF halfway across the world, in India, searching for something impossible to find at home—a cure. My body was falling apart.

Amy B. Scher

The reason: late-stage Lyme disease. Because of it, I was suffering from excruciating nerve pain, paralyzing fatigue, a broken immune system, and the list went on. Lyme disease had not only destroyed my physical self, but the rest of me as well. And in a tiny hospital on the outskirts of Delhi, a female Indian doctor was doing experimental embryonic stem cell therapy that would possibly deliver my long-awaited alternate destiny: health.

Looking at me, you might not have guessed anything was so wrong. I styled my wild, curly hair every day; painted on makeup; and faked being semi-normal. Yet inside the places that no one knew but me, I felt like a human lodged in the in-between— between living and dying. I had come to India for the treatment that might help me live again.

But it turns out, you do not go to India for what you want and carry it away with ease. And so, in my hospital room on the other side of the world, I found myself both wildly chained to my circumstances, and also freer than I’d ever been.

I’d always stuffed my feelings deep down in my body, covering up the cracks and weaknesses that I worried existed in nobody but me. But in India, an erratic, free-for-all country, even my cracks started widening—and it became clear what the crushing pressure of holding on so tightly had done to me. Not only had it made my life harder than it needed to be, but I started to really wonder how much this pattern had affected